The Confederate States of America (CSA), also known as the Confederate States or the Confederacy, was a republic in the Southern United States from 1861 to 1865, unrecognized as a sovereign nation by either foreign governments or the United States. The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by seven states that had seceded from the Union. The original seven were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas; the additional four were Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These states fought against the United States during the American Civil War in the wake of the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president, with the principal aim of safeguarding slavery amid fears of northern abolitionist influence and federal interference in slave property. The South also feared that Lincoln's insistence that slavery not be permitted to expand into the Western territories would result in the admission of additional free states and the eventual demise of slavery.
The Confederacy adopted a constitution establishing a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states". The federal government in Washington D.C. and the states that remained in it were known as the "Union". The Civil War began in April 1861, when South Carolina's militia attacked Fort Sumter. Four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—then seceded and joined the Confederacy. In February 1862, Confederate States Army leaders installed a centralized federal government in Richmond, Virginia, and enacted the first Confederate draft on April 16, 1862. By 1865, the Confederacy's federal government dissolved into chaos, and the Confederate States Congress adjourned, effectively ceasing to exist as a legislative body on March 18. After four years of heavy fighting, most Confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities by May 1865. The most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, after which any doubt about the war's outcome or the Confederacy's survival was extinguished.
After the war, during the Reconstruction era, the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress after each ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, "except as a punishment for crime." Lost Cause mythology, an idealized view of the Confederacy valiantly fighting for a just cause, emerged in the decades after the war among former Confederate generals and politicians, and in organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Ladies' Memorial Associations, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Intense periods of Lost Cause activity developed around the turn of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to growing support for racial equality. Advocates sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would continue to support white supremacist policies such as the Jim Crow laws through activities such as building Confederate monuments and influencing the authors of textbooks. The modern display of the Confederate battle flag started primarily during the 1948 presidential election, when it was used by the pro-segregationist and white supremacist Dixiecrat Party.
Historians widely agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the 11 Southern states that declared their secession from the United States (the Union) and formed the Confederate States of America. Seven of these states seceded before the outbreak of the American Civil War and four did so after hostilities began. While there is broad consensus among 21st-century historians that slavery was central to the conflict, there remains debate over which specific ideological, economic, political, or social factors were most influential and over the reasons why the North rejected the Southern states’ attempt to secede. Proponents of the Lost Cause interpretation, a viewpoint rejected by mainstream historians, deny that slavery was the primary cause of secession—a position contradicted by overwhelming historical evidence, including the secession documents of the states themselves.
A central political dispute in the antebellum period concerned whether slavery would be permitted to spread into the Western territories that were destined to become states. Initially, the Congress admitted new states in pairs—one slave and one free—to preserve sectional balance in the Senate, though not in the House of Representatives since free states tended to have larger electorates. By the mid‑19th century, the status of new territories as free or slave had become a defining political issue. Anti‑slavery sentiment was growing in the North, while in the South fear of abolition was intensifying. Another contributing factor was the rise of distinctly white Southern nationalism in preceding decades. The primary reason the North rejected secession was a commitment to preserving the Union, grounded in a sense of American nationalism.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, and his victory prompted declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South. These states—whose cotton‑based economies depended on enslaved labor—formed the Confederate States after Lincoln's election in November 1860 but before he took office in March 1861. Northern nationalists and Southern “Unionists” refused to recognize these declarations. No foreign government ever officially recognized the Confederacy. The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, did not cede control of federal forts located in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded the Union garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
Other background factors contributing to the breakdown of the Union included partisan politics under the Second Party System, the growth of abolitionism, disputes over nullification versus secession, regional nationalisms, expansionism, economic tensions such as the Panic of 1857, and differing paths of modernization in the antebellum period. Although slavery and its related conflicts were the primary cause of the break with the Union, it was the act of disunion itself that sparked the ensuing war. Historian David M. Potter observed, "The problem for Americans who, in the age of Lincoln, wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not logically be reconciled."
The first secession state conventions from the Deep South sent representatives to the Montgomery Convention in Alabama on February 4, 1861. A provisional government was established. The new provisional Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued a call for 100,000 men from the states' militias to defend the newly formed Confederacy. All federal property was seized, including gold bullion and coining dies at the U.S. mints. The Confederate capital was moved from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia, in May 1861. On February 22, 1862, Davis was inaugurated as president with a term of six years.
The Confederate administration pursued a policy of national territorial integrity, continuing earlier state efforts in 1860–1861 to remove U.S. government presence. This included taking possession of U.S. courts, custom houses, post offices, and, most notably, arsenals and forts. After the Confederate attack and capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln called up 75,000 of the states' militia to muster under his command. His purpose was to secure possession of U.S. properties throughout the South. The resistance at Fort Sumter signaled his change of policy from that of the Buchanan administration. Lincoln's response ignited a firestorm of emotion. The people of both North and South demanded war, with soldiers rushing to their colors in the hundreds of thousands.